Happy New Year! We are very glad that 2004 has been another exciting year for IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems ( TPDS). TPDS has gone through a very successful transition to Manuscript Central. We now handle all of the paper submissions, reviews, and correspondences through the system with greatly improved efficiency. The system allows associate editors and the IEEE Computer Society staff to track the status of each paper and send out timely reminders automatically. It has dramatically improved the review process. As a matter of fact, it has worked so well that now the average time between the paper submission and the first decision made by our associate editors after the reviews are back has been reduced to approximately three months in 2004. This is a significant achievement due to the tremendous efforts of our reviewers, IEEE Computer Society staff, and associate editors. It is indeed a far cry from just a couple of years ago. At that time, we faced a large backlog of papers with a significant delay in our review process. I am really proud of what we have accomplished since then. It adds to my belief that if we all work together, we can accomplish a lot. I would like to extend my deepest appreciation to everyone involved in this process.

We have also reversed the downward trend in the submission of regular manuscripts to TPDS in the last few years and experienced a tremendous turnaround. The number of regular manuscripts submitted to TPDS has jumped almost 45 percent from 2002 to 2003. In 2004, we have seen another significant increase, even though we do not have the final count yet. Amidst all of these increases, we still scheduled one special issue for February 2005. The subject of the special issue is "On-Chip Networks." It will be edited by L.S. Peh and T.M. Pinkston. There will be three special issues in 2006 with deadlines in 2005. Please check their announcements for details. The subjects of these three special issues are: 1) "Algorithm Design and Scheduling Techniques (Realistic Platform Models) for Heterogeneous Clusters," edited by H. Casanova, Y. Robert, and H.J. Siegel, 2) "Localized Communication and Topology Protocols for Ad Hoc Networks," edited by S. Olariu, D. Simplot-Ryl, and I. Stojmenovic, and 3) "High-Performance Computational Biology," edited by N. Amato.

TPDS held its annual editorial board meeting last year, again in conjunction with the International Conference on Parallel and Distributed Systems (IPDPS), in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Participating associate editors have made many constructive and useful suggestions to improve the quality and the operations of the journal. It also provided a venue for all associate editors to exchange their experiences and ideas on the management of the review process and the handling of paper submissions. The next editorial board meeting will be held at the International Conference on Parallel and Distributed Systems (IPDPS) in April, 2005, in Denver, Colorado. If you have any suggestions on what the board needs to consider, please forward them to any associate editor or me.

There are five associate editors who have successfully completed their terms since our last announcement. They are Ashwini Nanda (IBM), Esmond Ng (Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory), Richard Schlichting (AT&T Shannon Laboratory), Yuanyuan Yang (SUNY at Stony Brook), and Wei Zhao (Texas A&M). We would like to thank them all very much for the tremendous job they have done for TPDS, as well as the time and effort they contributed to the journal. In the meantime, we would like to extend our welcome to five new associate editors who are just on board. They are David A. Bader (University of New Mexico), Kai Hwang (University of Southern California), Andrea Pietracaprina (University of Padova, Italy), Jang-Ping Sheu (National Central University, Taiwan), and Denis Trystram (ID-IMAG, France).

In this issue, we also list all of the reviewers who have contributed to the review process in 2004. They spent a great deal of time and effort reviewing and selecting the highest quality papers for TPDS. I would like to express my deepest appreciation for their contributions.

Pen-Chung Yew

Editor-in-Chief

For information on obtaining reprints of this article, please send e-mail to: tpds@computer.org.

David A. Bader received the PhD degree in electrical engineering in 1996 from The University of Maryland, and was awarded a US National Science Foundation postdoctoral research associateship in experimental computer science before joining the University of New Mexico in 1998. He is an associate professor and Regents' lecturer in the Departments of Electrical and Computer Engineering and Computer Science at The University of New Mexico. He is a US National Science Foundation CAREER Award recipient, an investigator on several US National Science Foundation grants, a distinguished speaker in the IEEE Computer Society Distinguished Visitors Program, and is a member of the IBM PERCS team for the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) High Productivity Computing Systems Program. Dr. Bader serves on the steering committees of the International Parallel and Distributed Processing Symposium (IPDPS) and the International Conference on High Performance Computing (HiPC), is the general cochair for the International Parallel and Distributed Processing Symposium (IPDPS) (2004-2005), vice general chair for the Interntational Conference on High Performance Computing (HiPC) (2002-2004), program cochair for the Conference on Parallel and Distributed Computing Systems (PDCS) 2004, and program chair for the International Conference on High Performance Computing (HiPC) 2005. He has also served on numerous conference program committees related to parallel and distributed systems, is an associate editor for the ACM Journal of Experimental Algorithmics, a senior member of the IEEE Computer Society, a member of the ACM, and chairs the IEEE Computer Society's Technical Committee on Parallel Processing (TCPP). Dr. Bader has been a pioneer in the field of high-performance computing for problems in bioinformatics and computational genomics. In this area, he has given several keynote talks and served on distinguished conference panels. Along with collaborator Srinivas Aluru, he has cochaired a series of meetings, the IEEE International Workshop on High-Performance Computational Biology (HiCOMB), copresented a Supercomputing tutorial on opportunities and challenges in computational biology, and coedited a special issue of the Journal of Parallel and Distributed Computing on high-performance computational biology. He has coauthored more than 60 articles in peer-reviewed journals and conferences, and his main areas of research are in parallel algorithms, combinatorial optimization, and computational biology and genomics.

Kai Hwang received the PhD degree in electrical engineering and computer science from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1972. He is a professor of electrical engineering and computer science and the director of the Internet and Grid Computing Laboratory at the University of Southern California. Prior to joining the University of Southern California in 1985, he taught at Purdue University for many years. He has been working in the areas of computer architecture, parallel processing, distributed computing, and network security for the the past 35 years. He has authored or coauthored seven books and more than 180 scientific papers in these areas. An IEEE fellow since 1986, he has received numerous research grants and contracts from the US National Science Foundation, ONR, AFOSR, IBM, AT&T, MIT Lincoln Laboratory, Hong Kong RGC, etc. Dr. Hwang has lectured worldwide and performed advisory work for IBM Fishkill, Intel SSD, MIT Lincoln Laboratory, ETL in Japan, and GMD in Germany. He has chaired the Conference on High Performance Computer Architecture 1997, the International Parallel Processing Symposium 1996, ICAPP-96, ICPP-86, and ARITH-7 conferences. He has given keynote addresses at a dozen international computer conferences including the most recent Cluster 2003, NPC 2004, PDCS 2004, etc. Presently, Dr. Hwang leads the GridSec research group at the University of Southern California working on network-based computing, Internet security, computational grids, and clustered systems. Grid security for trusted distributed computing is the major thrust of effort from his research group at the University of Southern California. Distributed security architecture and self-defense tools are under development for security-critical applications. Visit his group Web site: http://GridSec.usc.edu for details.

Andrea Pietracaprina received the Laurea degree (summa cum laude) in computer science (1987) from the University of Pisa (Italy), winning the best undergraduate thesis awards from IBM-Italia and UNITEAM. He received the MS degree (1991) and PhD degree (1994), both in computer science, from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, IL. Since 1994, he has been with the Department of Information Engineering at the University of Padova (Italy), where he is currently full professor of computer science. Dr. Pietracaprina's main research interests concern: models of computation, algorithms and data structures for parallel and/or hierarchical platforms, data mining, and network routing. He has authored or coauthored more than 40 papers that appeared in international journals and conference proceedings, and has coedited the 1998 Proceedings of the European Symposium on Algorithms (ESA). In 2004, he was the corecipient of the Best Paper Award at the International Parallel and Distributed Processing Symposium. His research has been supported by several sources including: the US National Science Foundation, NATO, European Union, Italian Ministry of Education and Research (MIUR), and CNR. He has served as a member of the program committees for several international conferences: Euro-Par (1998, 2004, 2005), the ACM SPAA (2002, 2005), the ICTCS (2004), and WEA (2005). He has been involved in the organization of a number of international conferences and schools. He has also been a reviewer for projects funded by the European Union. He is currently a member of the ACM, the IEEE, and of the Advisory Board of the Euro-Par Conference.

Jang-Ping Sheu received the BS degree in computer science from Tamkang University, Taiwan, Republic of China, in 1981, and the MS and PhD degrees in computer science from National Tsing Hua University, Taiwan, Republic of China, in 1983 and 1987, respectively. He joined the faculty of the Department of Electrical Engineering, National Central University, Taiwan, Republic of China, as an associate professor in 1987. He is currently a professor in the Department of Computer Science and Information Engineering and director of the Computer Center, National Central University. He was a chair of the Department of Computer Science and Information Engineering, National Central University from August 1997 to July 1999. He was a visiting professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of California, Irvine, from July 1999 to April 2000. His current research interests include wireless communications, mobile computing, and parallel processing. He was an associate editor of the Journal of the Chinese Institute of Electrical Engineering from August 1996 to July 2000. He was an associate editor of the Journal of Information Science and Engineering from August 1996 to July 2002. He is an associate editor of the Journal of the Chinese Institute of Engineers. He was a guest editor of a special issue for the Wireless Communications and Mobile Computing Journal. He was a program chair of IEEE ICPADS 2002. He was a vice program chair of ICPP 2003. He received the Distinguished Research Award of the National Science Council of the Republic of China in 1993-1994, 1995-1996, and 1997-1998. He was the Specially Granted Researcher, National Science Council, from 1999 to 2005. He received the Distinguished Engineering Professor Award of the Chinese Institute of Engineers in 2003. Dr. Sheu is a senior member of the IEEE, a member of the ACM and the Phi Tau Phi Society.

Denis Trystram received the masters degree in computer science from the University Joseph Fourier, Grenoble in 1982. He received the PhD degree in applied mathematics at INPG (Institut National Polytechnique Grenoble) in May 1984. From 1984 to 1987, he was a lecturer at Ecole Centrale de Paris in computer science. In June 1988, he received the PhD degree in computer science at INPG. From 1987 to 1991, he was an assistant professor at the University Joseph Fourier, Grenoble. From 1990-1999, Professor Trystram was leading the Parallel Processing group at LMC-IMAG (30 people). Since 1999, he has worked at ID-IMAG where he is leading the group Ordonnancement et Optimisation Combinatoire (Scheduling and Combinatorial Optimization). He managed an interdisciplinary regional group for parallelizing practical. From 1998 to 2001, he was Dean of the Teaching Department at ENSGI-INPG. He is currently regional editor in Europe for the Parallel Computing Journal. Professor Trystram was coorganizer of the two major European conferences in the field of parallel and distributed computing (CONPAR and PARCO), and he participates regularly on the program committees of major conferences (PARCO, EuroPar, SPAA, STACS, IPDPS, etc.). The research activities of Professor Trystram concern all aspects of the study of the impact of parallelism on the conception of efficient algorithms (namely, model and design of parallel algorithms, scheduling and mapping, optimization of communications, and implementation of real applications on parallel machines). His main interest is on scheduling for which we have to design efficient approximation algorithms. A special focus is today on scheduling on clusters and heterogeneous networks (grid and global computing). Professor Trystram has published five books (in French, one was translated in English), and edited four books, including the Handbook of Parallel and Distributed Processing (Springer Verlag, 2000). He has been the scientific adviser of more than 25 PhD students. Many of them are now working in the academic world or in prestigious companies. He has published more than 60 articles in international journals and as many international conferences.